Yesterday afternoon, I have received a note from Frode Greisen, the President of EARN, explaining the position of the EARN Executive regarding LISTSERV. This note was simply disquieting, and I have spent most of the night trying to find a way to solve the situation without affecting the users. No matter how long or in what way I looked at the problem, I unavoidably ended up with one of the equations transforming itself in 1=0. This morning, after sleeping three hours, I have decided that the problem should be solved today. Not tomorrow. Today. And that I should preserve my sanity first, since the users will be affected in any case. Frode's letter came in a sad and tense context. Frode had contacted my boss a few days ago and told him about the LISTSERV business. You can imagine how much I appreciated this, after the Jose-Maria story. Anyway, Frode's note expressed the concern of the EARN Executive about the recent development of the LISTSERV story. The Executive finds unacceptable that a discrimination is made between countries, and that an equal degree of service is not provided to all of them, etc. They reminded me that the development of LISTSERV involved the usage of EARN lines, and of CPU time on a machine that I do not own, and that therefore it might well be that I am not legally able to make decisions about the product; Frode sent a copy of this note to the person at CERN who is responsible for following legal affairs. Although I am absolutely convinced that I would win such a case (even the employers of Jose-Maria, who planned to sue him in order to recover the property of the software he developed at GMD in his spare time, quickly changed their mind after talking to a lawyer, while Jose-Maria's trade-union assured him he had nothing to fear), and I could then legally extract a lot of money from EARN which they would have deserved to lose, I decided overnight not to follow this path. I am tired, very tired, and I want this business to end as soon as possible. A court decision takes months, if not years. I want to solve the problem today, even if that means I am being exploited once more. Finally, Frode reminded me that political discussions are not allowed on EARN. In particular, the surveys are objects of highly political and commercial contents. There will therefore be no new survey, and I have changed all the files in SURVEY FILELIST to GET=N/A, so that nobody can retrieve them. For this same reason, there will be no more political discussion about LISTSERV; all future discussions shall be on the basis of technical implementation of the decisions I have made this morning, with no political discussion. I have my own opinion about the Executive's eagerness to prevent political discussions on the network, but I will not formulate it here. To summarize, the EARN Executive does not like any of the plans (1,2,3), and does not appear to have another plan to propose. In addition, since surveys have a political aspect, there can be no new survey, and in any case there is no time for any survey, I want the problem to be ended now. I have therefore made the decision myself, and I apologize in advance to the EARN users. I have earnestly try to achieve a workable agreement, I have failed, I now have to save myself if I cannot save LISTSERV. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Final decision about LISTSERV and EARN <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< 1) This decision is final and irrevocable. Future discussions shall be on purely technical grounds, and on the basis on the acceptation of the decisions listed herein. 2) I am going to write a letter granting full and indefinite access to LISTSERV, release 1.5o (FIX15O1), to all EARN nodes, at NO COST to EARN; I will sign this letter and mail it to Frode, as soon as I receive his snailmail address. 3) I will not participate in the distribution of LISTSERV to EARN sites, even on a temporary basis. I merely allow EARN to perform that distribution, and it is their responsibility to decide how they wish to organize themselves. 4) LISTSERV support to EARN will be withdrawn as soon as EARN has found an alternative source of maintenance, and, as indicated in an earlier note, no later than June the 1st of 1989 in any case. 5) On the day this support is withdrawn, or shortly thereafter, I will ship release 1.6 of LISTSERV to all non-EARN sites. One month afterwards, I will remove all EARN servers from the backbone, since they will have become obsolete and they will no longer be supported. This delay of one month should allow EARN to organize their own backbone. 6) Upon request from the EARN Executive Committee, I would completely remove EARN nodes from PEERS NAMES rather than just changing their :backbone tag to NO. EARN nodes will remain in PEERS NAMES until I receive such a request. 7) On the day that I withdraw LISTSERV maintenance from EARN, EARN shall provide a stable electronic mail address to which I will forward all LISTSERV-related questions and requests that I might receive. If EARN does not provide this mailbox, such questions will be discarded unread. 8) I will make no other deal with EARN, will listen to no other proposal, will study no other possibility or extensions to this list of decisions. If EARN wants more from me, they will have to convince a court that they own a right to my time and to the work I am going to do in the future. I will, in any case, have to contract a lawyer for my protection. Eric